Portability of Hard Disk Drives between PCs

[Arthur Cohen]

Roger,

Thanks. I did see that article. It is helpful and does a good job of explaining the switches or parameters. However, it assumes that the reader knows the purpose of the utilitiy and has some experience with it.

Art

[Arthur Cohen]

I am beginning to wonder if I have a hardware problem. I took that 80-GB, 5400-rpm drive and reinstalled it in the computer with a Tyan motherboard (S1590) with an AMD K6III microprocessor, and 64 MB DRAM.

I used DISKPART from the Win XP Pro CD to delete the partition, and to create a 10-GB partition for Windows 98 SE. When I booted with the Win 98 emergency diskette, I checked it with FDISK, and discovered that DISKPART set it up as an NTFS partition, so I deleted it and recreated it with FDISK, and then formatted with FAT32, and proceeded to install Win 98. It went well, and I booted two or three times after installation.

Then I created a 20-GB partition with DISKPART for Windows 2000. When I tried to reboot, I received an error message, Operating System Missing. This happened repeatedly. I could boot from the Win 98 diskette, as well as from a CD. I could see the files on C: after booting to DOS with emergency boot diskette. FDISK reported partitioning information as expected, and the C: drive was reported to be Active. The boot process appeared to proceed normally until the OS was to load.

I had a problem about six months ago with the computer, when it would not boot for several months. Each time I turned the power on, the BIOS appeared to produce nonsensical characters, and could not even reach the memory check routine. I suspected a corrupt BIOS. However, one day it began working normally.

Would flashing the BIOS be in order? Could the CMOS battery be the cause of the problem? (The BIOS has never shown evidence of losing data; e.g., date and time.) Could the hard drive, which is about three years old (just out of warranty, I believe), be failing?

Art